if they want you, oh, they're gonna have to fight me
by acrosticacrumpet
Summary: Ginny isn't okay. Harry knows a thing or two about that. Harry/Ginny hurt/comfort, after the war.


**A/N:** Title from Laura Marling's "Night Terror", which is my song for this fic, along with Ben Howard's "In Dreams"; see also Mervyn Peake's poem "Out of the Chaos of my Doubt". **Warnings** for mentions of past abuse re Chamber of Secrets, PTSD, general mental not-good-ness.

* * *

Ginny woke up at the tail end of a scream, throat hoarse, heart trying to run a race. The room was very dark. Her heart was pounding so hard she could hardly breathe, and the images were still there behind her eyelids, like a camera flash.

Harry was already awake, half-sat-up in the rumpled sheets beside her. As her eyes adjusted, she could see his face lit all in bits, half-and-half, by the full moon. Strange silver shadows.

"Ginny, Gin," he was murmuring.

She made herself sit up, legs curling in towards her chest, as her heart rate slowed. She could hear her breathing, a violin tremolo. She didn't like that.

"Ginny," said Harry again, from behind her, with his low quiet voice. His sleepy, middle-of-the-night voice.

She turned a little to face him, and let out a long, shaky breath.

"I'll put the light on," he said softly, and rolled over to switch on the lamp on the bedside table. The room filled with dim yellow light, and suddenly she was in a rumpled messy bed, sheets creased where her feet had kicked at them, and her boyfriend was near her, half-naked and sleepy.

He had been half under the duvet, but seeing her sitting so small and curled outside it, he sat up properly, legs retrieving themselves from the sheets. He looked small like that. _Here we are like islands on the sea-bed_ , she thought.

They sat in silence for a while.

"Maybe you should talk to someone," he said eventually.

"The last time I talked to someone about my _feelings_ ," Ginny said, the words coming out from her mouth small and stony, "I woke up on the floor of the Chamber of Secrets."

"Yeah," Harry said softly, after a beat. "I know. I know." He leaned over and pressed his face into her warm pyjama-clad shoulder, not a kiss, just comfort. For a bit, neither of them said anything.

"But," he said, voice muffled. He lifted his head. "But. Ginny. Remember what I was like in fifth year?"

"An unmitigated prat?" she suggested, trying for a joke, but her voice came out sharp and heated.

" _Miserable_ ," he said. She shifted in the sheets to look at him properly. "I kept having nightmares, and no-one believed me, and I felt angry and helpless, all the time – I couldn't _do_ anything – and I kept feeling left out of things, and blowing up at people and feeling guilty, and I just felt like shit, basically. For the whole year. And I never talked to anyone about it, so I just... went on feeling like shit."

"Yeah," Ginny said, and swallowed. She remembered.

"You told me," Harry went on – "you were one of the only people who could break me out of it, and you told me, when I was scared Voldemort was possessing me, that I should have talked to you, because you knew how it felt."

"I did say that, didn't I," she murmured. Harry shifted closer to her, so their sides were brushing. As she sat cross-legged on the bed, in the dim warm light – strange timeless light in the middle of the night – the room was a bubble, insulated from time and things outside.

"All right," she said. "I take the point. I'll think about it in the morning." She let a breath out through her teeth, let her head drop. Reached over and pulled Harry's arms around her shoulders to warm her, as good as a dressing gown.

"I'm sorry I called you a prat," she said, in a small voice.

"Hey," he said, "if it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck..."

"It's doing a worryingly accurate impression of a duck, brought on by trauma?" She felt him laugh before she heard it, torso shaking happily.

There was a glass of water on the bedside table, next to the lamp. She reached out and took a gulp of it. A car or two went past outside, their headlights crossing the ceiling. The sound of their tires on the road told her it had rained while she slept. Harry's head was very close to hers, his hair soft, even messier than usual.

"It's not just – what he did to me, you know," she said, out of nowhere. "Tom, I mean." Her voice was rough despite the water. "It's what he made me into – someone who couldn't trust herself, someone who was so reliant on one person, and couldn't help getting fucked over –" She felt the pitch of her words rising. "Someone who _needed_ him –"

She felt Harry tense a little, even though his arms around her did not tighten. Not tense, even, really, just a little less pliant than it had been a minute ago. "You flushed the diary down the toilet," he said. "It was me and Ron and Hermione who picked it up again, that wasn't you. You tried to tell us what was happening. You were brave."

She bit her lip. He was right. It was just that those were the bits she never seemed to remember, in amidst the long loneliness and fear and unforgivable eleven-year-old _weakness_ of that year.

"Anyway," she said. "After that I – I didn't ever want to be like that again. I said to myself, no-one's ever going to be able to do that to you again. I decided I was always going to be the brave one, who dealt with things herself, and I wasn't going to tell anyone my problems because I wasn't going to _have_ problems, because I was going to deal with them head on, and I wasn't going to need anyone _ever again_."

She'd decided to be the hero. And she was _good_ at it, she was a hero for Neville, and Luna, and the DA, she didn't let anything scare her, she looked problems in the face and never hid. She was good at it. She was.

"You were brave," Harry said. "You are brave. You made your own courage."

"Do you think it was stupid?" she said. "To do that?" She would never have asked that question in daylight, but she was still only half awake, and it was the middle of the night, and her two am self didn't _care_ that she had a strict policy of not needing or wanting her boyfriend's opinion. Her two am self had a very small, sad voice.

She could have sworn she _felt_ Harry thinking. "No," he said. "No, I don't think it was stupid. I think..." He stopped to find words.

A car went past. She felt them both tense as it passed, relax when it was gone.

"After Sirius died," Harry said, very, very quietly, "I broke most of the instruments in Dumbledore's office. Did you ever go in there? All those delicate silver things... I started smashing them and throwing them against the wall. And he just sat there. And I yelled at him that I didn't care any more, I'd had enough, I wanted it to be over. And he let me shout at him. Then he told me I did care, so much it felt like bleeding to death."

Ginny turned her head to stare at him. He had never mentioned this, not in the years since, not ever.

"I hated him for it, back then." Harry's voice was very calm, studiedly so. "But when I think back to it I wonder if that was really one of the best things he ever did for me. Because he saw me. He saw me and he saw what I felt." She felt him press his face into her hair, as if to breathe it in. "And that's – that's what I want for you to have, Gin. You deserve that."

"Maybe not from Dumbledore, though," he added, as an afterthought.

"Be a bit off-putting, now, wouldn't it," she said, when she could speak casually again. "He's probably – probably decayed a bit –" And then she was laughing, but it was more like crying, with the big useless breaths she kept having to take. She held onto Harry's arms very tight.

Maybe, she thought, and the thought was sudden and strange to her, she wasn't always going to have dry eyes.

"Yeah," Harry said raggedly. "Yeah, I think maybe we'd better leave him where he is."

The room felt very quiet. Ginny let go of Harry and had another drink from the glass of water. She was tired of being awake and having problems, but she didn't want to have to go through the process of getting to sleep, of lying there waiting and waiting and trying not to worry about the waiting.

"I'm tired but I can't sleep again yet," she said. "This isn't fair."

"Hmm," said Harry softly. And then: "Shower!"

"Ooh, yes," she said automatically. She was still getting used to not living at home or in a dormitory, and having a bathroom that she had almost _unlimited access to_ , where she could take hours in the shower if she wanted, with scented body washes and things, and shampoo for slowly massaging into her hair, and endless endless hot water... "Wait. Shower?"

"Shower," he said firmly. "Wash your hair and everything. It'll take long enough for you to be really sleepy, and there'll be all that hot water and steam, _and_ you get to feel clean afterwards. On one condition."

"What's the catch, Potter?" she said, in a rallying tone.

"I get to come in too," Harry said, grinning at her. "I don't much fancy sitting in here by myself while you're in there. And that way by the time you get out of there, you'll be so sick of me you'll go to sleep just to escape."

Words failed her for a moment. Then she reached out, snaking an arm around his neck, and kissed him hard on the mouth. "I love you, you know?" she said, blinking hard, while he was still looking dazed. "This is why they made you Chosen One, for the bright ideas."

When they finally went to sleep, her hair was damp, and the streetlights were orange outside, and the room was dark, and silvery, and safe.


End file.
